Ode to a BOFFF

Yesterday, my part-time neighbor sat on his stoop tying his shoelaces when he yelled out to me, from about 20 yards away so the whole neighborhood could hear, “Do you know if you’re having a boy this time?”

My daughter and I were just walking back from the park; she pushed her baby stroller, which was piled with dolls and stuffed animals, and I awkwardly bent over the low handle to help her. I heard my neighbor’s question, while steering my child’s stroller off his gravel driveway, and I took awhile to process what he was asking. But then I got it. I stood up. I tugged my tee-shirt over my stomach.

“Oh no,” I said, “I’m not pregnant.” The pleasantness of my own voice surprised me.

“But,” said my neighbor, with a disheartened tone, as though what I said was a personal affront to him, “My wife said you are.”

“Nope.”

My daughter pushed the stroller past the man’s overgrown laurel hedges and I was glad to chase her down, out of sight from him, before I said my usual quip when mistaken to be pregnant, “This belly is just leftover from the last one…” I had seen his wife on the way to the park; we talked about gardening, she showed my daughter and I some of her latest projects. I realized, while walking up the street, she must have been thinking that whole time about my swollen belly and what lurked inside.

What lurks inside is a sensitive subject, of course. I’ve written plenty about the complications endured after the birth of my daughter: the distension of my abdomen, the bloating due to gallstones, and yes, the weight gain. Several times in the two and a half years since I actually was pregnant, people have outwardly verbalized they thought I was “with child,” and, for the most part, I take their mistake in stride, even though their mistake indicates a weirdly public (and in my neighbor’s case, very loud) acknowledgement of my weight gain and bodily changes, which then brings up for me the whole question of how skinny and perfect does a woman need to be to not be mistaken as pregnant. Still, long before I had a baby, I did my share of adolescent struggling with body image issues – weight, slenderness, hair color and amount, facial and body features, etc. – and after the birth, I struggled again with all the changes my body has gone through. I have made peace with my body, mostly because, as a feminist, I find the reality that almost all Western women have body image issues an outrage and a travesty. The issue of body image is not my greatest struggle when people assume I’m pregnant.

What comes up even stronger for me is the reality that I’m not pregnant. That I won’t ever be again in all likelihood. That while I might look pregnant, my belly is entirely empty of a growing, wonderful life. I’m sad I won’t have another child. I’m sad I won’t experience being pregnant again. I’m sad I won’t have a chance, ever in this life, to birth a child through my body the way I’d always hoped and dreamed. What lurks in that belly is emptiness and bereavement, and when people point my belly out to me, I guess I can be grateful, because usually at some point soon after their mistake, I actually get to feel those feelings in the form of crying or banging on my bed or processing with a friend or my husband or the blank page, all of which is hard to find the time to do when chasing a toddler around.

I do find it odd that every time people have made this mistaken assumption to my face, none of them have apologized. Not one said something to the effect of, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” or “I’m embarrassed,” or otherwise acknowledged that their blurted-out wrongness about another child on the way might have affected me. I also find it odd (read: sexist) that my neighbor asked if I was having a boy, as if my luck might be better the second time around.

I know I’ve said this before, but ultimately, I long for the days when a woman’s body was revered for its fertility and ability to create life, indicated by her large belly, big breasts, and overall plumpness. The days when “zaftig” was a compliment seem ideal to me (that Yiddish word, by the way, means “juicy.” Doesn’t that just sound delicious?) When I fist moved to our little coastal town, there was a women’s boutique along the main road with an overhanging sign, called – I kid you not – “Ample and Alluring.” And while we laughed plenty about that name back then, I kind of miss that sign now.

In some circles, zaftig females are revered, and indeed, people are out there fighting for them. Bear with me now as I take you on a journey of allegory…

One of my husband’s jobs is to fight for marine conservation, which is a controversial issue where we live. When I was only about seven weeks along with our daughter, the whole newness of the pregnancy a secret only for us and immediate family, my husband had to give a talk to a bunch of locals about the importance of new marine protections that were under consideration by the state government. Confident and assured, my husband stood in front of a crowd of about fifty people, most of whom he and I knew and considered friends, and discussed the science behind these proposals. He taught the crowd about what marine scientists call BOFFFs – big, old, fat, fecund females – who are part and parcel of a healthy and thriving ecosystem, in this case a rockfish spawning ground. He showed graphs up on a screen which indicated these BOFFFs produced exponentially higher numbers of healthier fish who could survive greater fluctuations and stresses in their environment. He expounded the importance of creating protections for these BOFFFs so their spawn would then spill out into the rest of the sea to help create yet even more healthy ecosystems. He then told the crowd that there was a BOFFF among us, and pointed to me in the back of the room and said, “my wife, who’s pregnant.” Our crowd of local friends roared with laughter and surprise and joy, as most of them had known us for over a decade and thought we’d never have a kid. I turned bright red, not unlike a healthy rockfish, and felt a mix of emotions, from the shared joy in the room to wanting to kill my husband for telling everyone I was pregnant so early in the game.

Nonetheless, I soon became known around these parts a BOFFF, and a lot of people looked forward to the birth of our daughter. I’m proud of the comparison now, and proud my husband is out there fighting for us. I’m big, old, fat, and fecund. I have a belly that looks fertile to a lot of people. And, though I spawned only one and sometimes am sad about the fact that I won’t spawn another, I produced one heck of a healthy, strong, independent little offspring who I believe will one day strengthen and fortify our murky human sea.

The Complications Continued - The End!

Complication #11. The c-section “apron” and scar tissue.  Who knows where the moniker, the “apron,” really came from when referring what happens to the skin on the belly after a cesarean?  If you can answer this question, I’ll send you a prize.  There are some great sites out there that discuss the reality of women’s body’s after having babies, versus what we see in the popular media of movies stars having twins by c-section and magically getting back to their pre-baby bodies in six weeks.  I appreciated this woman’s and other’s courage here.  Still, I would say, I don’t have an apron; I have a fanny pack worn on the front.  Like the worst kind of computer nerd from high school.  I might as well have leaky ink pens in my front pocket and tape around my the nosepiece of my thick, black glasses. 

Since the birth, I’ve had weight loss and gain while trying to regulate my fat intake in order to be adequate enough to feed my child and also yet low enough to not experience another gallbladder attack.  My weight has fluctuated and what’s remained has all landed on the frontside of my stomach.  I still look like I did when I was six months pregnant.  And yep, I’ve had the experience many times where people asked if I was pregnant.  The first time was when I walked into the college where I taught one day, with my daughter in tow, and a colleague said, “Oh, you’re expecting another one?”  To which I patted my belly and replied, “Nope, this is just the leftover from my last one.”  I’ve now made this reply several times in the last two years.  Even my daughter, who is now becoming aware of babies in bellies, asked me one day if there was one in there, and when I replied no, she pulled out my shirt and stuck her head under and said she wanted to be in my belly, which about made me cry with cuteness and the reality that I still want her in there, too, so she can come out the other way.

I’ve had moments where I’m bummed and angry and annoyed about this extra weight and the heaviness I feel and the bulge that overhangs my belt, which others called the “muffin top,” which I thought was funny, though again the metaphor isn’t quite accurate for me – a danish, maybe.  The fact that there is such a clear delineation in flatness from my pelvic bone to above the scar is odd to me; again, a clear blockage of energy that hasn’t been released.

Lately, I’ve been the grateful guinea pig of a friend of mine who is in a healing school and needs practice clients.  One day, in her nice apartment, with a candle burning and me laying on top of soft blankets on a massage table with nice yogi music playing in the background, she laid her hands on me in various ways to check my energy and chakras and see what lurks beneath.  I was not surprised when she assessed my abdomen was murky and full of muscus-like energy she had to “clean out” just to “see” around in there.  I know the energy is stuck, I’ve written about it already, but the daily reminder via the “apron,” seems to me a bit of overkill.

The other part of the c-section apron that’s a bummer is the numbness and tingling and slight pain that still exists two years later around the scar.  I’ve written about this already, too, so all I’ll say is since the birth, I have to wear a belt with most pants, because otherwise they fall off.  The fashion world doesn’t design pants that are made with for a woman with a sideview like a fanny pack, unless, I suppose, I went back and bought more maternity pants, which would be confusing and sad.  That beltbuckle that I must wear, while it’s not a rodeo cowboy-sized buckle, presses right on my scar and hurts and numbs me out or somehow causes discomfort on my scar many days of the week, especially if my child is in a particularly cuddly mood and wants to sit all day on mama’s belly.  Again, that pain is just the reminder that she didn’t come out the way I’d hoped.

Still, I do wish society were different.  I wish, like the size of a man’s penis, the size of a woman’s stomach, or maybe, even, the size of her apron, was a badge of honor and an attribute to be envied.  I birthed a human being out of my body, for goodness sake, an adorable, smart, healthy kid who knocks me out most days with her “ideas” and the way she needs to line up her toys or the shoes at our front door with such persistence and vigor.  I wish that even I thought more often of my used-up belly not as a burden but as a beacon of womanhood and fertility and a miraculous god-given gift.  I wish that society thought the bulge and bumps of my belly, not the two by four of the typical next top model, was sexy, the way that I think hills and rolling valleys are more inspiring and interesting than flatlands; they offer more dynamic, lovely views with more mystery and intrigue.

Complication #12.  Delayed Post-Partum Depression.  I don’t know for sure what clinical depression is.  I don’t have an opinion on drugs or no drugs for depression.  But I do know “without help” sometimes “it,” whatever “it” is, is too much for me.  And to clarify, by help, I don't mean drugs, I mean help from another person, usually someone of the professional sort, but sometimes also a friend or plain old good listener.

The first eight months of my daughter’s life, I was coping.  I did my day to day work of meeting her needs and also worked at the college teaching writing, which started nine weeks after she was born.  I was grateful for the class work, because it took my mind off of the pain in my body and on my mind.  And keeping my mind off that pain was the best I could do.  So, I was coping rather than healing.

In my previous job as a non-violence educator, when I used to teach about creating healthy relationships, I often drew this model (see below).  The model helps people understand that in our day to day lives, we will be hurt by little or big hurts, and while we don’t have much of a choice about whether or not we will be hurt in our lifetime, we do have the choice to either heal from or cope with those hurts.  Here’s the model, pretty simple, and yes, I stole it from someone, somewhere a long time ago, and I’m sorry but I don’t remember from whom:

YOU

COPE                      HEAL

HURT

You can draw your own arrows from “YOU” to the “HURT” and it’s your choice how you get there, via coping or healing. 

Coping is not a bad thing, per se, I’ve done it a lot in my life – when I was drinking, I was coping, or when I’ve over-exercised or overworked, or surfed the Internet too much or watched too much T.V.  All of these activities and many others are pretty normal coping strategies and, sometimes, for some people, they do take the edge off of certain hurts.  But for me, and for others, too much coping often leads to more hurt, as it did in the case of my drinking.  Or even in the case of too much television watching, I’d argue, I’m hurting my brain and my intelligence.  Eventually, since I’m trying to create a healthy relationship with myself, I choose to do some healing.  And for me, healing usually requires help. 

After eight months post-birth, when I hadn’t really slept more than five hours in a row at night, and when I hadn’t dealt with my sadness of the birth, I found myself crying uncontrollably for no apparent reason, after doing the dishes, say, or in moments alone.  I was irritable, frustrated and getting out of bed was hard. 

I yelled one night at my daughter at eleven p.m. for waking up out of a dead sleep. I actually went into her room, turned on the light, slapped the wall hard with my hand and screamed “what do you want?”  I startled her, which only made her wail more.  And then I felt so terrible, so guilty.  Later that week, I realized, I couldn’t even see my baby girl.  I was looking at her, but there was a dark silk veil over my eyes and I wasn’t seeing her.  I knew I needed help and I told my husband so. 

I sought that help, via two different professional counselors over the summer when I wasn’t teaching.  The counseling helped get me back on my feet, deal with much of the real sadness of the birth, and most importantly, help sink in that the birth did happen the way it did and there was no going back.  Up until that point, I wanted to will the experience to be different, and my pushing and forcing energy was not helping me move on, nor helping me be able to mother my child.  The counseling helped me integrate the trauma of the birth with the reality of my day to day life.  I felt happiness again, and joy at seeing my daughter grow.  Also, the counseling helped me start to see another side to the story, or at least to envision writing my own end to this saga. 

People have scoffed at post-partum depression and that fact conveniently brings me back to Oprah, where a few years ago there was some hullaballo that one famous person publicly judged another famous person’s experience of post-partum depression.  My point here is, for me, post-partum depression, while delayed, was real, and I had to make a choice, heal or cope.

So, why circle around all this writing about The Complications in order to talk about Oprah?  Because one day in that post-partum depression time frame, one late in the afternoon, I’d had enough of being a good mother and playing on the floor with my child and helping her sleep and loving her for the day; I wanted a break.  So, I turned on the television, when I knew Oprah was on, to see what she was up to.  I missed much of the first half of the show, but I caught last part of the episode about the woman who, after the c-section birth of her second child, contracted the flesh-eating virus, which subsequently and quickly meant she lost part of or all of each of her limbs.  This woman, after birth, had to learn how to cope with two new prosthetics on her arms, and eventually two more for her legs; essentially she had to learn how to live in an entire new body.  I was dumbfounded at her post-birth complications and instantly, I saw how I had it so good.  This woman was amazing and you can probably see a lot more about her all over the Internet. 

And one thing I heard on the show really helped me decide to start pulling myself together and go get some help to do so.  The woman said the whole time she was in the hospital dealing with her complications, what got her through, what made her work so hard, was so she could get home and be with her children.  She had to learn an entirely new way to move in the world, but her kids were what motivated her to move at all. Watching this woman made me say, “but for the grace of God go I” and count my blessings.  Watching her also made me decide to make some phone calls in the morning, which I vowed to do.  And then, I turned off the television and got back down on the floor to play with my child.

Happy New Year to all.

The Complications Continued – Part Seven, Eight, Nine and Ten – Will They Ever End?

Complication #7.  During pregnancy I did notice a few weird skin things that happen with such great hormonal fluctuations, like skin tags or discoloration, but for the most part they went away.  However, one particularly bothersome tag remained on my upper thigh, and since I had gained weight during pregnancy, this tag rubbed a little too often on my upper thigh.  After I visited the local doctor who gave me the prescription to have an ultrasound so I could find out I had gallstones, decided to go back again and ask her to remove the tag by freezing it with liquid nitrogen, which she mentioned as a possibility.  The experience of having my legs in stirrups again while being worked on only added to the seemingly endless array of disgrace to my undersides, but, at least, I thought, the thing wouldn’t bug me anymore.  Well, apparently, I killed the queen, and the drones buzzed out with a vengeance.  After I removed the band-aid from my leg, I contracted a gross skin poxvirus called molluscum contagiosum, which looks pretty much like it sounds.  I blamed the local doctor, by the way, because a.) she should have known that this complication could occur and didn’t tell me, or b.) she gave me the disease because her clinic wasn’t clean enough.  This virus is not harmful, but it is ugly, and since during this time I was also experiencing Complication #8, my hair falling out in clumps all over the place, I wasn’t in the mood to be more uglified.  Then the worst part was, my baby daughter contracted this virus a few months later – hers lasted about four months, with us trying to treat it with various creams and teatree oils, but, mostly, hers just finally went away one day.  Mine did, too, but it took over a year before the last drone finally died.

Complication #9.  Athlete’s foot.  Seriously.  Never had athlete’s foot in my life, even though I was always an athlete, always with sweaty feet, always wearing sandals in the summer, no matter the rain or dampness on my soles, or rain boots in the winter, when my feet got too hot in neoprene or capilene.  And then, constantly, when I was pregnant, I showered in the YMCA locker room after swimming without my flips flops, with total insolence toward the petrie dish surely proliferating on the dirty tiled floor.  Plus, for sixteen years I lived with a husband who did have athlete’s foot (I’m outing my husband’s foot disorder); I shared the same shower with him, and kvetched when he sprayed the stinky foot spray in our bedroom.  So, suddenly, a few months after my daughter was born, this virus shows up on my feet, too?  With its itchiness and pink, raw skin, and hardened soles?  Now?  Why?  Because my immune system was shot full of holes during birth and all the viruses I’d fended off during my mostly healthy life were happy to be out to get me now.  Of course, I wasn’t really the victim of these viruses, but I sure felt like one, which leads me to….

Complication #10.  Sex.  The complete lack of libido and desire and energy to even have one thought about perhaps maybe even thinking about having sex with another human being and/or the issue of painful sex.  I don’t actually want to write about this subject, not because I’m bashful, but because I’m worried weirdos will Google keywords such as painful sex and find my blog, which will be, I’m sure, a major disappointment to them, although I guess I don’t care about disappointing weirdos.  Let’s just start by saying the six week rule after birth by which to have sex is crap.  Try six months at best.  Yes, yes, my poor husband, and lo, all the other poor partners (read: male partners) out there.  But with the advent of complications number seven, eight, and nine, which, by coincidence or eerie fact, all ensued at right about that six week mark, I didn’t feel particularly sexy in my lower regions or any region for that matter.  The difference for me between the sensual joy I experienced during pregnancy, where I felt creative and womanly and authentically feminine for perhaps the first time in my life, and then post-birth, where I felt sore, tired, creaky, cranky, bloated, and absolutely lust-dead, was quite a shift, for both me and my main man. 

The lack of libido is a real aftereffect of hormonal changes, especially while breastfeeding.  My life was all about coping with the challenges of new motherhood for the first several months, especially in my physically compromised state, and sex was the last thing from my mind.  But meanwhile, my boobs were out and about a lot for those around me to see.  The myth about breastfeeding edging out the husband, which reminds me of that old joke that Robin Williams did a long long, time ago about babies coming out of the womb, pointing to their mother’s big breasts, and saying “those are for me,” has, for me and my partner, pretty much been true.  However, if we’re rating priorities, feeding my daughter my milk was and will always be more of a priority to me than having sex.  My husband has been accepting of this new situation.  He knows breastfeeding is important for our daughter’s development, and he knew ahead of the fact that I’d breastfeed our child for a long time, and he while he might not have known that this period of reduced sexual activity would only allow him to get more spiritually fit via patience and understanding and virtual celibacy, he gets to learn that spiritual fitness is an unexpected outcome of marrying me.  In any case, almost all the pictures he took soon after the birth show my daughter nursing, usually with an obvious close-up of my big old boob.  And Freud thought women had penis envy.

Another aspect to consider is that, even though I had a c-section, sex was extremely painful, in fact, impossible for me, for many, many months.  Perhaps this pain is not normal or usual, since a fifty-four hour labor with eleven hours of pushing and having one’s baby’s head stuck between a pelvic bone is also not normal or usual.  We did try to have sex at that magical six week mark because I was wanting desperately for the birth not to have happened the way it did and so tried to pretend everything was normal.  But that night, it was quite apparent nothing was going inside of me.  I didn’t actually know how sore I was inside until we tried, and then probably a month later tried again, and then after another lapse of time, again.  The knowing how much it hurt me was not exactly a turn on for my husband, and after the third try, I don’t think we tried again for a long, long time.  These efforts at getting back to normal through sex, for me, only made me realize how different my new body was, and made me start facing the reality of what I’d been through. 

The final, and most important, aspect to this subject about sex is that, after having a c-section and feeling so sad about that reality, the truth was, I didn’t want anyone going inside of my vagina if my daughter couldn’t come out.  The vaginal canal, to me, now seemed a marred place, a place inside my body, once full of hope and expectation.  My whole body was split down the middle, right where my scar still bulged a little pink.  The mix of pain and soreness and emotional loss all welled inside of me and I didn’t want to deal with it at all.  I wanted only for my daughter to have come out of my body through the passage built for her, which felt swollen and painful with the absence of her not coming through.  I imagined my insides were once a small natural spring, dug into a dirty canal by third world workers, whom were never paid well or compensated for their labors, and then the channel devolved into a wasteland.  The waters, like the Chicago River perhaps, flowed the wrong way and caused crime and pollution in the city.  I realize this metaphor may be over the top, but when women say things like “vaginal birth is overrated” or try to compare the difficulties of their vaginal births to my c-sectioned one, or try to stop me from talking about this subject, I look for words and images to explain how I feel.  My energy was stuck in the place where my child was stuck.  I want more than anything to clean up the canal, to have it returned to its natural spring-like state, and while the recovery is better now than earlier on, there is still work to be done before visitors will be completely welcome and encouraged to explore. 

The Complications - Part Two - This Part is Even Messier

That bloating the Good Nurse promised happened by Saturday night.  The whole time I was in the ICU, nurses kept coming in, constantly, both the ICU people to change the six pints of blood they ended up giving me and the four bags of frozen platelets, and the maternity nurses who kept arriving to “check my fundus,” which means they were making sure my uterus was shrinking properly.  However, after the beating my stomach took during the hemorrhage, the pain in their prodding felt severe and worsened with every examination.  My stomach turned into a hot air balloon, blowing up bigger and bigger, and thus facilitating the nurses’ need to press the air in there even harder and harder to “check the fundus.”   I still hadn’t eaten anything even though it had been four days since I went into labor in the first place.  I know I hadn’t eaten because I remember my husband taking a break at some point on Saturday afternoon – he needed to just get away from The Complications, I’m sure – and he’d gone to Izzy’s or somewhere hideous like that and when he returned, at 6 p.m. on Saturday, he found me throwing up air and bile into a bedpan, uncontrollably.  All of the sudden, my body just had to purge the excess air in my abdomen and since I’d pushed for about twelve hours, the “Rectum? It nearly killed him” joke my Dad always quipped was no joke for me and nothing was leaving my building in the south part of town.  My body had to release the gas and so up the esophagus it purged, and purged and purged and purged.  I’ve never thrown up like that before, a constant dry heave over and over and my husband was holding the bed pan and I asked once “what’s happening?” and then I barfed again, bile and water.  The nurses ran around gathering more bedpans, they were surprised, too, I think, and they  let me throw up because, I guess, there wasn’t much they could do to stop me.  The whole situation was absurd, and as I was gagging and coughing and then barfing again, somewhere in there I said to my husband, “I’m like that guy in Team America,” which made us both laugh, and by now I was also crying and laughing at the same time all while throwing up.  Seriously, I only watched Team America once (once was enough), but that scene where the hero is barfing in the alley uncontrollably, with ridiculous barfing sounds and total exaggeration of spew and jerking movements was exactly what was happening there to me in the ICU, except I didn’t even have the excuse of being out- of-my-mind drunk.  If you need a visual, you can see that here, which is a crazy thing about the Internet, that I can on the spot provide you with the visual, which no one really needs to see, so don't click that link.  The only difference between me and that guy was that I didn’t have anywhere close to the volume of vomit that he did, but the convulsions and sounds are remarkably similar.

Anyhow, after this new turn of events, to top it all off, that night I met Evil Nurse, a young nurse with a sharp pointed haircut who looked snarly about the fact she had the night shift.  She decided putting a tube down my nose would be the best way to get the gas out of my stomach.  My poor nose, the only orifice of my body that hadn’t been completely violated during the past forty-eight hours besides the oxygen they gave me after the hemorrhage.  Evil Nurse came in with this nose devise, the name of which I’ve completely blocked out, sat me up and told me to breathe out through my nose and then in again really fast while she poked my nostril like a chimpanzee digging for ants with a stick.  I flinched.  I started to cry.  She shot me the evil eye like I was being a baby.  I let her try again, because I did have to relieve the gas in my abdomen.  But when she prodded again with all the grace of a gorilla and the device poked the back of my throat, I gagged while simultaneously holding myself back from punching her in the face.  Then I started to sob.  “I can’t do this,” I blubbered and she backed off, looking annoyed and not the least apologetic. 

An older nurse came to assist Evil Nurse.  I could see the older nurse had some wisdom in the lines in her face and she suggested a good old fashioned enema.  I’d already pooped full frontal in the doctor’s face while trying to push my baby out, so what was yet another indignity to my lower end?  The older nurse’s idea worked and finally I was relieved of the most hideous bloating in the history of many lives and my peristalsis started finally working on its own and the next thing you know, my lovely husband was wiping my lower end every other hour because I could barely make it to the little bedside toilet much less turn around to clean myself up.  I said to him then, “Remember in our vows when we said, ‘have faith during the difficult times’?  I think this experience is what we were talking about.” We laughed, he wiped.  The humility. 

The one good thing, yes there is one good thing, about all this chaos was that my husband got to do some serious bonding with our daughter.  He changed her first diaper, which, I have to note, he put on backwards, a fact I’ve always thought is both baffling and endearing.  And he spent many an hour holding her while she needed to be held those first days, the two of them sleeping together in the room that the Good Nurse had wrangled for us in the maternity ward, my girl curled up on her daddy like a big baby frog.

My body finally stabilized, and I was released from the ICU Saturday evening, and only thing I wanted to do was get out of the hospital.  But, I still had to wait another night for the doctor to take out the staples from the c-section.   Burned Out Nurse was back on duty and she said she could take the baby any time in the nursery if I needed.  One of the worst moments of my new motherhood was that night when I was too exhausted to deal with my new daughter’s crying – she was changed, clothed, warm, fed and totally inconsolable.  My husband was asleep and I had to let him sleep since he was exhausted, too.  I wheeled my screaming new baby in her plastic crib down the hall to Burned Out Nurse at the front desk of the nursery and I cried as I turned away to plod back to my room and get some rest myself.  My second night of being a mom and I couldn’t be there for my new little girl. 

The Complications - Part One - This Part is Messy

Several years ago, Jonathan Franzen wrote a book called The Corrections, which was wildly popular and I read it and thought the novel was okay, but I thought mostly that he was more brilliant to accept and then reject Oprah, because that move probably did more for the press and subsequent sales of his book than just being on Oprah, which, of course, he has now been on for his new book called Freedom, which I haven’t read and might not after reading this review of the book by Alexander Nazaryan in the  New York Daily News, which I though was rather astute.  Anyhow, these series of blog posts are called The Complications and have nothing to do with Franzen, except that there’s an echo of his title in mine and, in regards to the aftermath of my particular birth experience with my daughter, this essay does have a tiny bit to do with Oprah, which I’ll get to eventually, but it might take a while.

This bit of writing about The Complications is bound to be long and arduous for you and me and yet, I have to write it and so you can read it if you want, but I mostly post this publicly, as with other posts, to help another who might have suffered similar complications.  However, I recommend if you’re reading this while pregnant, you don’t read much further because, well, I don't think reading these posts will help you relax.

Besides a birth ending in a cesarean section being a major complication to a candle-lit, dimly-lighted, bathtub-soaked “home birth,” I might have been more serene with this serious surgery if I didn’t have the major fallout afterward, starting with that massive hemorrhage, which I’ll call....

Complication #1. 

I remember the moment, my brand new daughter was at my breast – she’d already fed once already and was working on her second helping when I felt my uterus contract inside me like a clenching of a giant fist and then I felt a gush of blood, a surge roiling from my body and I sort of flinched and said to the nurse, “there’s blood coming out.” 

This nurse and I had had some tension between us, in fact, for clarity, I’ll call her the Burned-Out Nurse because she’d been a nurse for twenty-three years at that point and had a bit of the ol' surliness to her.  Before the c-section, this nurse was the one who got kicked out of the birthing room by the shaky-hands doctor who was trying to extract my daughter via a vacuum from my body because she decided there was too much pressure on the baby’s head and popped the extractor by turning off the power.  The doctor shouted with meanness in his voice to “get out” of the room, which, as I was pushing and pushing was shocking to me.  This nurse was also the nurse who, when I first was admitted to the hospital, said to me, “we should talk about a c-section,” to which I replied, “I don’t want to talk about a c-section.”  She was gunning for one the whole time. 

Anyhow, back at the recovery room, after I mentioned the blood that I could feel saturating the pad and then some, Burned-Out Nurse lifted the sheets over my legs and said, quite calmly, “That’s not normal,” and punched some sort of call button on the wall.  The next thing I knew, two young intern-looking women were at my feet, and then a bunch of people rushed in the room and my baby was taken out of my arms and left to scream with her father in the corner until some other nurse escorted him (now crying) and my newborn out of the room.  I was made horizontal and people were standing over me saying, “Can you hear me, Nancy?  We need your permission to give you universal blood, we don’t have time to get your blood, can we have your permission?” and I kept saying, “I’m just tired, why are you bugging me?” which didn’t answer their questions at all. 

Shaky-hands doctor rushed in next, a tall tree-trunk of a man, and he stood on my belly with all his weight, pumping his hand in a steady rhythm, and I heard the word “hysterectomy,” and then the next thing I know he had his other hand up my crotch and I could feel the pressure there though I don’t remember pain since I still had epidural juice in me and since I was also probably on some other drugs I don’t even know about for sure, and the other nurse, not the Burned Out one but the one I first met when I was admitted the evening before who was now on-duty again, who I’ll just call the Good Nurse, was saying to me, “stay with us, Nancy, stay with us,” while I rolled my head on my pillow and willed them to stop pounding on me as my blood pressure dropped to thirty over forty, which my nurse and doctor friends now tell me means almost dead. 

While all of these medical professionals pounded on and yelled at me, I watched them waiting for what was probably thirty seconds but seemed like several minutes for somebody special to arrive.  They kept asking, “where is she, where is she?” and when “she” arrived, I was quite surprised to see this new woman in an old-fashioned Nurse Ratchet uniform, complete with white opaque stockings and paper nurse cap bobby-pinned to her hair.  She wheeled in what I know now to be the blood transfusion machine.  But at the time I thought “this woman is who they’ve been waiting for?” forgetting the day was October 31st, Halloween. 

I also remember Good Nurse saying to me she was going to give me some drugs that would help stop the bleeding but would cause quite a bit of bloating in my intestines, but as gushes of blood coursed out of my body, who was I to say “no?”  And by the way, I didn’t know until this momentous experience that all that blood coursing around our bodies actually is just looking for a way out.  I thought blood wanted to bring oxygen and life to our limbs, but, nope, it turns out that all those red and while cells running around are just searching the labyrinth of our veins and arteries for a big hole so they can be set free.  Once that hole exists, they make a run for it, and if our body doesn’t have its clotting powers (in my case because my womb was so pooped from the extra-long labor, and because I’m old and my body doesn’t function quite as it once did), that blood is going to pour out of us like Niagara Falls. 

 Anyhow, the staff at that hospital completely saved my life and my uterus, and I’m very grateful to them all for their fast thinking and work.  Even Burned-Out Nurse did her job quite well, and I’m thankful, and I couldn’t really stay angry at her for gunning for the c-section since she was the one who pressed the button so that I could live to feed my child again.  Later she told me in all her years of being a nurse she’d never seen a bleed like that and I really “kept them on their toes,” so I guess that’s some kind of karmic payback for her wanting the c-section in the first place.  Still, the staff working on me was impressed I never did totally lose consciousness.  Afterwords friend told me I surely would have died at the birth center with that kind of hemorrhage and I know that theory to be true, which is why the universe was good in that I was transferred to a hospital, however, in truth, I believe I never would have hemorrhaged like that if I hadn’t had a c-section, but of course, we’ll never know so it's a moot and mute point. 

After I was somewhat stable, the team of nurses and doctors and the new guy on duty, called the Hopsitalist, who was, honestly, dressed in a woman’s pink candy-striper shirt and yet another Nurse Ratchet paper hat, told me I’d have to go to Intensive Care and babies weren’t allowed in there.  I did not like this idea.  I wanted only to be with my brand new baby.  I didn’t understand then how I had lost over half of my blood and they needed some time to pump more of the red stuff and a bunch of platelets into my veins.  I didn’t want to go, but as I was quite exhausted by then, who was I to argue?  And again, here I give praise to the hospital, specifically the maternity ward staff, because they wheeled my baby in her plastic tub crib into the ICU every chance they got to have her nurse at my breast, the little sweetie swaddled and tucked between IV tubes and blood pressure bands permanently attached to my arm.  They even let her fall asleep with me in the bed for little snatches. 

By the time we’d settled into the ICU, my mother and another good friend had arrived.  Outside the curtain of my “room,” the Hospitalist explained to my stunned mother, “You remember how we used to say that women ‘bled out’ after birth?  That’s what happened to your daughter.”  A phrase no mom ever wants to hear, much less from a guy dressed in a pink candy-striper shirt...
...to be continued....